China gets ahead in supercomputer race

According to the latest Top500 data on supercomputing capabilities, the share of installations based in China continues to increase, with the country now hosting 227 systems, or 45 per cent of the total number of installations world-wide.

However, while China has the most systems, the US still dominates in terms of performance. Two systems at the US Department of Energy (DOE) rank first and second in the world: the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The number of US-based supercomputers continues to decline, reaching in November 2018 an all-time low of 109, 22 per cent of the total.

The EU has 92 supercomputer installations in the top 500. The UK leads with 20 supercomputers, France 18, Germany 17 and Ireland 12. Germany has the best-performing EU supercomputer installation on the list, ranked 7 worldwide, based at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Garching near Munich.

Top500 is a closely watched list of global supercomputer capacity maintained by three researchers: Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and Martin Meuer of ISC Group, Germany.